Bipartisan legislation often gets cast aside
The claim: “House Democrats have passed more than 275 bipartisan bills this Congress, but these bills are gathering dust on his desk.” — U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-El Paso.
Escobar made the claim in the Democrats’ Spanish-language response to President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address, in which she said the president and his allies are “the biggest threat to our safety and security” because they are “unwilling to take action for our country, acting solely in their own interest.”
PolitiFact ruling: Mostly True. Escobar counted bills as bipartisan if they had at least one Republican vote in favor or at least one Republican co-sponsor. Political experts said that her measurement is not inaccurate, but it doesn’t conform to a general understanding of the
term.
Using a higher bar for measuring bipartisan legislation offered by these experts — support from a majority of members of both parties — plus counting legislation that passed on a voice vote, the total comes to 251 bills, which is close to Escobar’s claim.
Discussion: In Escobar’s remarks, she blamed Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.
“Mitch McConnell, the leader of the Senate, is openly stonewalling legislation that would help improve the lives of veterans, women, and families — all of us,” Escobar said, according to an English language translation of her remarks provided by her office.
Escobar’s office shared a list of 291 “bipartisan” bills that were approved by the House since the beginning of 2019 but are awaiting action in the Senate, as of Jan. 24.
Elizabeth Lopez-Sandoval, spokeswoman for Escobar, said Escobar considered bills as being bipartisan if there was “at least one Republican vote on the House floor,” or if the bill was passed by a voice vote and “has at least one Republican cosponsor.”
“Bills that passed on voice vote but do not have at least one Republican cosponsor were excluded,” she said.
While there is no singular definition of what constitutes a bipartisan bill, four political experts consulted for this piece generally agreed that Escobar used a low bar by which to judge cooperation between political parties.
Kirby Goidel, director of the Public Policy Research Institute at Texas A&M University, said the term “bipartisan” has taken on a looser definition in regular usage because it is “advantageous in terms of public support.”
“It is not unusual to call a bill bipartisan when it only received a single vote from across the aisle, though that runs against our more general understanding of what the term is intended to mean,” he said in an email. “It is also easy to imagine individual representatives more willing to compromise because they are Republican representing a Democratic district (or vice versa), so adding one member of the opposition in that context wouldn’t strike anyone as ‘bipartisan.’ ”
Goidel said a better definition for bipartisan would be legislation that has “majority support from both parties.”
“Though ideally we wouldn’t include resolutions or other items that generate little or no opposition, because the term also implies that the parties worked together to compromise on an important and potentially controversial issue,” he said.
Members of both parties tend to make claims about bipartisanship based on support from one member of the other party, according to Laura Blessing, senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Government Affairs Institute.
“Everybody does this,” she said. “This is strategic messaging to a larger audience about the nature of legislation and values of main sponsors in reaching across the aisle, but that doesn’t mean it is a meaningless standard.”
Of the 291 bills Escobar’s team marked as bipartisan, 116 passed in a roll call vote and 175 passed by a voice vote. There were 251 that could be called bipartisan using the higher standard.